Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week!
Apologies for the delay this weekend, there is chaos all around us. On a completely unrelated note, Happy Thanksgiving to our US readers!
Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.
Continue reading Weekend Update: 11/24/2024Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.
Continue reading Weekend Update: 11/16/2024Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.
Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.
Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.
Dire Wolf Digital closes books on Cortex Prime Kickstarter: Perhaps a niche bit of news, but Dire Wolf Digital put out a statement on the long-running Cortex Prime Kickstarter. Cortex Prime funded on Kickstarter seven years ago, and over that time the system has changed owners twice; Dire Wolf Digital acquired the game from Fandom. Here in 2024 there was one outstanding element of the Kickstarter rewards, print copies of the Cortex Spotlights, and Dire Wolf decided to officially not pursue printing the spotlights given the costs. For the several hundred people who backed at that level, they’re out a potential reward. On the other hand, thanks to the game changing ownership, Dire Wolf never received any money from the Kickstarter campaign.
I think this is worth discussing because it shows the third outcome of a Kickstarter, one that (unlike failing outright) is more common in large, corporate-backed games. The core product of the Kickstarter is released, but due to the post-campaign sales lagging, the money to get the rest of the goals over the finish line never materializes, and the campaign drags on 90% fulfilled. With Cortex, unfortunately, you can see this happen: A very late campaign, for a system with enough promise that not one but two different media companies see it as worth buying, that for multiple reasons is not really selling.
I am a big fan of Cortex Prime. I also think it’s been saddled with some terrible business decisions, including the decision to try and sell the game in a closed ecosystem (which not even Marvel is truly getting away with). While Dire Wolf will likely at least break even continuing to support Tales of Xadia, the real way for them to make a return on this investment and get Cortex Prime the attention it deserves is to nut up, kill their dead storefront, and get PDFs on DriveThruRPG. 30% of nothing is nothing, and that’s how much the Cortex Prime distribution strategy is earning them.
Cortex Prime suffered and may die at the hands of boneheaded distribution, but the game is a truly fascinating set of mechanics that, with some good supplements, could outperform GURPS as a generic system for a lot of gamers. From the archives we’re looking at Aaron’s review of Cortex Prime.
One of my biggest weaknesses is struggling to improv: While you’re not going to learn how to improv solely from a Reddit thread, this discussion does set down some good ways to think about improv, and things you can do to improve your skills.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, through Mastodon via @CannibalHalflingGaming@dice.camp, and through BlueSky via @cannibalhalfling.bsky.social.
Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.
Continue reading Weekend Update: 10/19/2024Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.
Hurricane Helene’s (and Milton’s) Impact on Tabletop: Rascal’s Rowan Zeoli writes:
“In the last two weeks, a pair of catastrophic storms have made landfall in the southeastern United States. Helene and Milton, Category 4 and 5 hurricanes respectively, have caused immense amounts of damage across Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas; both from their direct impact and the subsequent infrastructure destruction of these climate change-induced catastrophes. While Rascal is a publication about games, it is also a publication about people who love them—their lives, their passions, their hopes, their fears—and to go without acknowledging the effect of these storms would be a disservice to them, to you—our community of readers—and to anyone who believes there is a possibility for a better world. We must know what we are up against and how we can come together to keep each other safe.”
It’s a damn solid article with first hand accounts, community efforts, justified alarm, calls to action, and genuine hope.
As discussed in the Crowdfunding Carnival this month, Onyx Path is campaigning Curseborne, a different twist on the urban fantasy that typifies the World of Darkness…which is also (at least in part) published by Onyx Path. From the archives today we’ll look at another design house which double-dipped into Urban Fantasy, albeit in the opposite direction. While Magpie Games is well known for releasing Urban Shadows, a fantastic PbtA take on World of Darkness style urban fantasy, they also released Undying, focusing more specifically on vampires and taking a different (diceless) approach to PbtA mechanics. Check out Aki’s review.
Is this hobby just wildly inaccessible to dyslexics and non-readers?: This week’s OP is working with teenagers with different learning disabilities, and even in spite of these disabilities they’re still using RPGs as a core activity in their program. It may not come up with all (or even most) of our gaming groups, but it is important to remember that delivering a game experience as a big book or multiple big books does lock out potential players; potential players who would be perfectly capable of the actual act of roleplay itself. It’s hardly just RPGs where accessibility is overlooked, but it’s one place that we as hobbyists can give some hard thoughts to.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, through Mastodon via @CannibalHalflingGaming@dice.camp, and through BlueSky via @cannibalhalfling.bsky.social.
Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.
Continue reading Weekend Update: 10/5/2024Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.
Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.
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